Sneaky Pete

The cat lock / screen porch / vestibule is nearly done. I am absolutely delighted with it. The first night it truly existed as a porch, someone brought a delivery and actually put it inside the porch! Swoon.

Our realtor had said that while we could get away with not painting the exterior of the house, we should paint the interior, and we should have the soffits (the boards covering the underside of the eaves) scraped and painted. My sister and I both felt we should do the same things for the house regardless of who bought it, so even though it is now known who ended up buying the house, I am going to go ahead with this work. I got a quote from the fellow who painted the interior of the house, but he thought that maybe there were some soffit boards that needed to be replaced, so we put the scraping and painting on hold until that could be determined.

The renovations people are going to assess the soffits and fascia (the little vertical boards that run along the edge of the eaves) and replace individual bad boards as needed. I contacted the painter to say that after this is done, he can paint, though I had sensed his heart might not entirely be in this. I mentioned that, and he allowed that he is recovering from a minor injury and doesn’t really want to go up and down a ladder a million times. (Who does?) I can understand that, so I said I’d find someone else to do the painting.

I had the name of a painter a friend was happy with and had them over yesterday to provide a quote, which was more than twice as much as the quote of the first painter, though it also included painting the exterior of the gutters. It did not include taking off the gutters and painting whatever lurks behind them.

However, the gutters have to be taken off to fix the fascia boards, so it struck me that it would be efficient to see if the renovations people can go ahead and do the scraping and painting while they have the gutters off for the repairs, and indeed they can, for more than three times the initial painting quote.

“It’s just money, it’s just money,” I say once again, smiling wanly to myself. My sister suggested that the second painters could run over and scrape and paint while the renovations people have the gutters off, but they are currently scheduling for March. (In the spring!)

Last month I spent about triple what I should be spending, but it’s only money (!) and much of that was one-time expenses having to do with moving into a new place or improving / taking care of the place. I came upon my father’s notes about buying this house and maintaining it. It will be interesting to see what he thought was necessary and what vendors he liked or didn’t.

I have learned very lately that, as soon as I start to feel chilly, it is important to react by changing clothes right away. Otherwise, the feeling is hard to eradicate and causes gloom to set in along with the physical discomfort. It’s also important to take a layer or two off my bottom half in order to upgrade to warmer items, or off my top half, but not both at once: too suddenly and awfully cold. It reminds me of when we were children and would be instructed by our mother in the winter not to open doors on both sides of the car at the same time, to keep the brutally sharp wind from blowing right through.

I have ordered some thick sweatpants and also a second fleece-lined flannel shirt. I have had one of the latter, the same one, for many years now. It is wonderfully warm. I am wearing it right this minute. (As a survivor of early stage breast cancer, I generally avoid polyester, but I really could not do without this shirt.) Along with the sweatpants, I ordered a second fleece-lined flannel shirt, because what if I’m wearing my one such item and then dribble an entire tablespoon of olive oil down the front?!? It has never happened in all these years, but it could! Anyway, I figure buying warm stuff is fair game for a person who has just moved from California to Michigan.

I also found some of my father’s notes on the family tree and see that my great-grandfather died in San Francisco, while his brother died in Sacramento. For some reason, my father’s father ended up in Baltimore, where my father was born, and then my father and his parents moved to Michigan, where my father’s mother had grown up and where several other members of that part of the family lived. I wonder how my grandfather came to meet his Michigan bride. Maybe it’s in my father’s notes. He and I were the only members of our immediate family who were interested in this kind of thing. (Weirdly, I found a photograph of those grandparents on the Flickr page of someone I never heard of, identified as being relatives of his.) (Oh! I wonder if that is the child of my cousin. I will inquire.)

I often have felt a bit downcast in the evening here. It seems dark and lonely and gloomy even inside. I thought maybe listening to the radio at night and hearing human voices would help, and maybe it will, but this hasn’t really taken so far.

However, I think I hit upon a simple solution this evening, which is to turn a lot of lights on. This had eluded me until now because I’m trying to be more mindful about economizing, and because my father was extremely careful not to waste money. He didn’t yell at us to turn off the lights when we walked out of a room (or about anything else), but it was clear that that was what a right-thinking person would do, and I can sort of hear him murmuring, “Turn off the lights,” when I exit a room.

It is indubitably wasteful to turn on unneeded lights and to leave them on in rooms that one is not in, but this is a question of mental health. I immediately felt better when I turned lights on in the four areas adjoining the kitchen, though there was also a little bit of melancholy due to one of those rooms being the one where my parents spent most of their time. Nice and bright, all right, but no father in his recliner and no Rachel Maddow on the TV. No TV, for that matter.

I went out to visit my new plants today before weekly grocery shopping, and was displeased to see a deposit of dog poop next to the house, clearly from Digby’s dog. No other neighbor’s dog comes into the yard, and this area is far from the sidewalk. I went back inside to get two plastic bags and picked up the poop. If I see Digby, I will mention it to her, and if I see poop here again before that happens, I will write her another letter. Kind of frustrating that she does not just put up a fence.

Last night I attended an online election training put on by Indivisible and the ACLU and plan to volunteer as a poll monitor. I had thought of being an election worker, but that is too big a commitment for right now, both in terms of the preparation beforehand and the all-day shift. I also signed up to go to an October 17 event here in Ypsilanti. 

One particular thing here is better than I expected: I thought I would miss the neighbors in my apartment building, just hearing their occasional sounds, and hearing the people playing soccer in Mission Playground outside, and seeing the people walking up and down the sidewalk, should I exit the building, but it is turning out that my neighbors here give an equally satisfying sense of nearby humanity. I do not hear them or see them as often, but, on the other hand, I know them better. I know them by name. I know them to speak to and have some sense of their lives: That one plays the trumpet. That one has back problems. That one just started kindergarten (and reports that kindergarten is great!).

Carol-Joy and I often play cards when we get together, an enjoyable pastime indeed. She and her sister devised a method of playing online, but when Carol-Joy and I tried it a few months ago, I found it awkward and not very enjoyable. Now that I am far away, though, I decided I had better give this another try, and it could not have gone more smoothly. This is marvelous! It was great to see Carol-Joy and to spend an hour playing cards and chatting a little. As she pointed out, this is something we can easily fit in pretty often, an hour here and an hour there. The game is called Sneaky Pete.